The Gatekeeper

by Nuraliah Norasid

  She neared home to find it the same way she’d left it, its windowed curtains drawn and gaping doorway dark. There was so little work in the mines nowadays, no overtime to keep her back late and no rosters to go over before heading home. Her day-to-day schedule consisted of idle staring into nothing, smoking her lungs away, reading the news—sometimes Ria’s books—and tiring of the routine every time it ended, knowing it was only going to start again the day after. It was not yet 10 o’clock, so the lights from the blazing overhead lamps carved out portions of light in the dark interior, revealing a folding table, its mismatched companion chairs, a little of the tiny kitchen and Ria’s narrow bookshelf made out of small wooden crates nailed together.

  What she hated most about idle days was that they gave her too much time to think about the old days, as if she was some washed up decrepit thing constantly going, “Oh! How great things once were!”

  And in truth, they were not.

  She didn’t know when it was that she became less of a sister to Ria—she didn’t know if it was the time she had lost Ria in the crowd on the day when the Tuhav ended and the Occupation began. In the quadrangle near Waro’s store where that crowd had gathered as if in candlelight vigil. She had been there with Ria, allowing herself to be taken by the surge and press of bodies, hoping to catch a glimpse of the news about the progress of the war. There had been the fear, attaching itself like a sucking leech onto the stone skin of men; had been the fear that the forces might find Nelroote. She’d felt Ria’s hand slip out of hers, remembered herself grasping for it and ended up with only empty air. She’d peered into the sea of people, using her height as a vantage point, hoping to see Ria’s distinct head among them. But it was as if her sister had been swallowed by the crowd, and then had drowned in it.

  She could not remember the search itself, but recalled bursting upon the sombre faces in Pak Arlindi’s home where the man and his last remaining child sat. Abang Seh had suddenly stood, one hand on the back of the chair, body half-turned as if ready to run. After they had told her where Ria might have gone, for a time Barani could only stare at them in disbelief.

  “She’s barely fifteen,” she had said. Softly, with deepening rage, or sorrow. Who was to say what she had felt at that moment?

  No one had said a word at first. Then Abang Seh had spoken up, eyes downcast, “She volunteered.”

  Barani remembered going up to the man so fast, her hair ablaze, the desire to turn him to stone barely in check. “And you let her? Two able-bodied men?” At the door, she remembered lividly saying to Pak Arlindi, “If you had wanted her killed, this is the surest way to do it.” Pak Arlindi had only stared ahead, not meeting her eyes.

  Later she would find Ria after tearing through the settlement in a state of denial, calling and calling like she was looking for a child, after making every wrong turn she could possibly make in the labyrinthine catacomb. During the search, she had felt as if she was seeking a ghost. And it had been a ghost she found when she finally came across Ria. She had seen her sister under the sunbeam, standing again amongst the silence of the dead. Barani had never wanted the innocence of leaf grasshoppers and static time drawn on paper clocks more than she did then.

  Ria’s eyes had been red and swollen as they looked upon the first stone soldier. Barani had not known that snakes could appear so limp and unwashed until she saw how they hung around Ria’s face. The baju Ria had worn on that day was a gaudy yellow piece with puffed sleeves and fake pearls sewn into the lace pattern down the front—a donation from a woman in the settlement. At the time, it had not fitted Ria’s small frame, so the girl appeared smothered by it, a bulge showing around the waist pressing through the satiny material where the kain needed to be rolled many times in order to fall to the right length. The ankles that showed beneath the kain had been knobbly; the bit of shin that could be seen thin and covered in scabs.

  “Ria—” Barani began, but hadn’t been able to continue after that.

  For the gaze that Ria had showed turned her cold. What she said after cut far deeper: “Someone had to do it. And if you make me go back, I will kill every single person in that settlement and you know you cannot stop me.”

  In retrospect, Barani wondered if she should not actually have taken that threat seriously. She couldn’t remember if she’d left immediately after. She couldn’t remember much of anything from that meeting, except that she had left without saying much else. And she had continued to say little during the times she stopped by with food and supplies for Ria on her way to doing the same for the other watchmen the settlement had posted.

  When Ria returned, she was already a woman grown: chest busty, hips filling out the kain so that it was wrapped tight around her form. Her shoulders were stalwart straight. She had lost a snake head and her feet were calloused after having discarded her slippers some time in the four years that had passed. The wounds she had sustained on her face and body, and which she would not talk about even when Barani had asked in panicked concern, had healed into alarming scars.

  And she looked, but she never saw. She scanned. She scrutinised and penetrated with every gaze. But it was never personal. There were even days when those eyes had been blanks. Ria had become a quiet girl since moving to Nelroote; post-war Ria was nearly mute.

  Ria had thrown herself into normal living with the blind fervour of the over-determined. But she integrated into normal life with as much ease as would a Scerean in the fur of a Cayanese. Kept a pristine house, maintained the premises and took up the dreadful work of interring Manticura’s dead when it was decided that they would have to go back to the ancestral practice. Whose ancestors, Barani didn’t know.

  After Nenek passed, family life had been the two of them. And for years after the Occupation, family became a threadbare relationship made out of sparse conversations, lowered eyes and oblique gazes; full of questions that wished to be asked, but wouldn’t form. At first the thin interactions were discomfiting to Barani, and she had tried: to make small talk, to bring Ria out and let her meet people, bring her gifts in the form of trinkets and dresses—to do her part as Ria’s sister after she had failed all those years before. Sometimes there had been gracious sparks: when Ria was fitted for a few new dresses, when she received those dresses after they had been completed, with their fitted waists and the flaring skirts so fashionable at the time. Barani would watch as Ria spun herself in front of the mirror in the seamstress’ home.

  But never once did Ria look at her reflection. Try as they might, Barani and the seamstress, saying: “Look at it. Is the colour okay?” “Beautiful! Nice colour. Look at it.” But no amount of beseeching “look, look” could get Ria to look. She would only keep her eyes down, watching the flare of her skirts with the smallest of smiles.

  Over the course of 40 years, there was a point where Barani stopped trying.

  Barani went into the house, which was empty as expected, and dropped the items she had bought onto the table. She was about to settle down for a smoke—box in hand, a stick already between teeth, lighter poised—when a shadow spilled from the open door, cutting off the light from the outside.

  Barani turned, almost with a start. Though it was one of the settlers she was expecting, Ria stood in the threshold instead, carrying a small basket filled with fruits, dried goods and a bottle of cordial, likely a gift from Hana’s family, whose daughter had just passed from a drug overdose.

  “You’re home early today, Ria,” she couldn’t help but remark.

  Ria stood a while, blocking the doorway and peering over her shoulder as if at somebody. Barani lit the lamp that sat on the table. She did not expect an answer and Ria gave none as she stepped into the house, forgetting as always to wash her feet with the water from the earthen urn stationed by the door.

  In continued silence, Ria unpacked the basket. She lit the kerosene stove. Barani lit her cigarette.

  The pan went over the fire and then: “I wish you wouldn’t smoke when I’m cooking.”

  Bara
ni was still on her first puff, the cigarette clamped between index and middle finger, about to migrate back to her lips. At Ria’s words she stopped and looked to her sister with surprise.

  She must have sat there, mute and blinking her eyes as if testing their ability to do so, for quite a while, because Ria added, “It gets into the food. It gets everywhere.”

  Slowly, and with eyes fixed on Ria, Barani put the cigarette out by dropping it into the cut-off bottom of a plastic soda bottle which served as her ashtray. Bodies of dead cigarette butts floated among water-logged ashes on the surface of the browned water it was filled with.

  She almost smiled when she argued, “I have been smoking for, what? Forty years? And only now you say that?”

  There was a spark in Ria’s eyes then. Displeasure it might have been, but it formed a furrow between Ria’s brows. Her lips were set in a pert little line. She appeared about ready to burst out with a chastisement. But Barani could only move herself to the window as she tapped another cigarette into her palm.

  “I smoke here, can?” she negotiated.

  “Outside,” Ria told her, indicating the door with the spatula she had taken hold of.

  Barani slipped the cigarette into the breast pocket of her shirt and looked to Ria as the latter greased the pan with some oil.

  Holding up two eggs, Ria asked, “Do you want eggs?”

  Barani waggled her head by way of saying, “Yes.”

  Ria couldn’t abide runny yolks or blinding whites, so she made mata lembu eggs browned with crispy edges. She fried four and gave Barani two. As was her habit, Ria would read at meals: the same few books, over and over, so that their pages had become blotched and crusted with oil stains and sambal. Barani gazed over her plate at her sister’s bent head, at sickles of eyelashes cutting swabs over cheeks, always with a sense of wonder at the time that had passed. Ria ate with aged grace but she was always done with her food in the time it took her to read a page, maybe two if the lauk was too hot or difficult to eat. When she was done, her eyes lingered on the page while a finger trailed delicately over the oily remains on her plate. Nenek used to harangue her for reading at meals—“What sort of lady is this? Reading while you eat?”—but had always let her read anyway.

  “Rice,” Barani said absently.

  Ria looked up, confused.

  Barani pointed to the corner of her own mouth to indicate the rice that was stuck to Ria’s. “You have rice on your face,” she said, mildly amused.

  Ria caught the rice with the tip of a finger and slipped it into her mouth.

  “I…” Barani began. “That Changer from the other time. I hope we’re not seeing any trouble?”

  For a moment, Ria’s expression opened up into one caught by surprise, but it was soon gone and she said, “He—has not given any trouble. But—”

  “What’s wrong?” Barani asked.

  Ria considered her for a time. Barani could almost see the battle in her countenance.

  Finally, Ria revealed, “I saw Sani come out from the Dream Garden just now.” After a beat, she added, “He said he won’t be coming back today.”

  Barani raised a brow. “Having seen the sun,” she remarked with some resentment, “you wouldn’t want to go back to the dark. He thinks it’s a bigger, better world out there, but it isn’t.”

  She saw Ria lost in thoughts of her own and went on to assure her, “The boy will be fine. Probably has some girlfriend on the surface. It’s hard for him, you know, keeping one life here and one up there?”

  Ria nodded quickly, eyes shifting and blinking as if trying to rid itself of an undesired image.

  That night, Barani didn’t fall asleep as quickly as she usually did. They had lived in that home space almost all her life, but she was sure that she hadn’t paid acute attention to it before the way she did then, after lights-out plummeted the settlement into a pitch black mimesis of night. Barani could hear one of the neighbours making for the shared toilet nearby. There came the faint sound of water being thrown down the hole from a bucket. Water for washing had to be carried from a centralised public pump that tapped into an underground reserve. The water came out hot, so it had to be left to cool before they could use it. The sisters kept a washbasin under the long table that ran along the far wall beside the stacked up pots and pans. The little kerosene stove sat on the tabletop with a basket of cooking essentials. Their old kettle was in its usual place on the stove, already filled for morning boiling. The plates were on a dish rack on a smaller table where Ria carried out most of their meal preparations. By the dish rack, their kitchen utensils stood in a holder of plastic mesh. The wooden chair leg nearest to her was shiny, the squared edges smoothed over the years and touching it, and Barani could feel the scratch lines. There were a lot of them. She wondered how they had even got there.

  Beside her on her own folding mattress, Ria slept on her side as she always did, facing the wall so that Barani saw only the outline of her back. Ria slept curled so tightly, as if she wanted to fold in on herself or hold an object close for fear of losing it. And so still and stiff. Like a corpse. She had a mind to reach out and shake Ria awake just to tell her how she slept: “Hoi! What’s this? Sleep like a dead person!” She did no such thing, only continued to watch as her sister slept the sleep of the dead, whose company she fancied better. Barani shifted, mirroring Ria’s pose so that they were spooning without touching. She sleeps so deeply, Barani thought, and yet her eyes were ringed like they’d been keeping eternal vigil.

  “Ria,” she whispered, trying.

  There was no response.

  Turning onto her back, Barani stared up at the murk above. She tried to imagine what it would be like to die or be dead. The prospect of no longer walking the earth and stone was one suddenly frightening to her. However, silence and an eternity of darkness were but words, limiting and nothing when the experience itself was beyond description. Worship of the deity, the Blood Mother—the Lady—was bound to an ancient religion, born out of superstition now that the Nelrootians owed their existence to the architectures of a long dead people. No one knew for sure what their idea of an afterlife was. A number of the people she knew believed in the Rion circle of renewals that lasted for as long as time flowed. A constant cycle of rebirths sounded far more comforting to her than the Divine’s idea of absolute hell and heaven.

  She reached out and tangled her fingers in Ria’s curls, stirring them awake but not their owner. It had been a lifetime ago when she had last done that, before the tough wall of feisty girlhood and painful experience loomed up around Ria, impregnable as a barbed and invisible fortress. She thought about how it would have been if the fairy tale she’d dreamt for herself had come true all those years ago. This moment in the dark world would certainly not have manifested.

  Ria stirred then, and Barani lifted her hand just slightly free of the other’s hair.

  “Ria?” she called, feeling suddenly foolish and old.

  Her sister didn’t reply, only turned to face her, her forehead resting lightly on Barani’s shoulder.

  Oblique

  Between spinning 360 degrees for no apparent reason, bringing up his sights either too soon or too late and the occasional showman announcement of “Humiliation!”, Eedric was not doing too well in the multiplayer map. At all. Targeting took too long with the console controller and felt too clumsy, and for someone getting his ass handed to him a lot, he sure kept checking the leaderboard often to see if he was anywhere near top score. Or at least not too near the bottom. On the other end of the headset mike, Miz was doing far better in the multiplayer game than he was. Good thing Miz was on his team. On the opposing side, some annoying kid was complaining about Miz’s cooked grenade suicides, in between telling Eedric how he—the boy—had fucked Eedric’s mother last night.

  If only the boy knew.

  At one point, he could hear Miz’s own mother ask if Miz wanted anything to eat—Ria had taught him before: “Eh, you want to eat or not?” in Sce’ ‘dal—before
leaving, it seemed, with the rest of Miz’s family for a wedding reception somewhere in the east.

  “Not going?” Eedric had asked at the time.

  “Need to entertain you, what,” Miz had replied, all while executing the perfect sniper rifle long shot from a significant distance away on the map. In that span of time, Eedric had been spawn-killed a few times and then tea-bagged on the last.

  “Fuck!”

  Adrianne was in his room at that very moment. Had been for some time now. Came to his house, “to spend some time”, according to her, and the whole time he had been gaming with Miz, he had felt nothing but her eyes on his back as she sat on his bed.

  Finally, she crawled over to sit on the edge of the bed he was leaning against while he played.

  “Can you give me some time now?” she asked. “I came all the way—”

  At first he cut her off with a noncommittal grunt, then replied, “We’ll go eat after this next game.”

  He barely heard Miz’s voice asking, “Girlfriend?” over the headphone, because Adrianne had caused the bed to bounce with the deliberate and overstated gesture of annoyance she made outside his line of sight.

  “How long have you been playing that game already?” she voiced. “You asked me to come all the way here just to watch you play a bloody game?”

  Eedric whipped his head around to look at her. Ignoring the fact that he had his headset on, he replied, “I didn’t ask you to come down.

  You wanted to come down. And for what? You have nothing to do. I have a match to win.” He turned back to the screen; it showed that the match had already begun. Then a hit was indicated by a sudden shaking and reddening of the screen, followed by another, before someone’s virtual soldier came up to him and finished him off with a knife. Gesturing at the scene, Eedric very near shouted, “Stop making me lose!”